Mercedes 1999 Annual Report Download - page 24

FRONTRUNNER
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all conditions – other traffic, weather conditions, road sur-
faces, or general hazards and crises. The “driver” can experi-
ence the entire spectrum of conditions and vehicle perfor-
mance in real time, while his own performance and reactions
are similarly measured. There’s practically nothing about a car
or its driver this machine cannot test. “There are other simula-
tors,” says Käding, “but nothing as sophisticated as this. With it
we can make concepts driveable without actually building
them first.”
What the simulator and other technologies have been to
Mercedes-Benz and automotive engineering, Chrysler’s so-
phisticated CAD system has been to automotive design.
At Auburn Hills, Walter Solak, responsible for Design
Operations in the Product Design Office, demonstrates the
use of CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive
application) software that is becoming the group’s dominant
platform for all phases of development, from product con-
cept to plant design. Solak says advanced vehicle concepts
such as the Dodge Copperhead Convertible coupe have been
modelled by computer to such a precise state of finish that
the company’s top managers can approve them for further
development on the strength of a CATIA-generated video
demonstration. CATIA’s power is in its ability to build and
store layers of design data, and make them available in a
common language to all parts of the design and manu-
facturing process simultaneously. It’s a shorter, more flex-
ible, cost-efficient process that is slashing overall develop-
ment and manufacturing times – another example of how
DaimlerChrysler is getting its products to market better and
faster than ever before. CATIA enabled Stuttgart to cut its
development lead times by three months, i.e., 15%, during
1999, and the time taken to build a Mercedes-Benz proto-
type has been cut by 30%.
“What we’ve done,” says Janet Priestap, responsible for Plant
Solutions, who has been overseeing a trial program for the
design by CATIA of a new Jeep plant, “is take what we’ve
learned in automotive design and apply it to plant design. We
can ‘fly’ you through an entire plant. The vision is to enable
virtual manufacturing.” The benefits are multiple. “It allows
earlier and more effective optimization of plant and process
design. It supports faster launches. The virtual approach al-
lows bugs to be identified and eliminated long before imple-
mentation, resulting in lower costs, better production facility
utilization, and shorter time to market. This is not science fic-
tion,” says Priestap. “We are already applying these tools.”
PROCESS LEADERSHIP. Taken in tandem with the “agent-
based factory” being perfected in Berlin, Priestap’s exposition
offers another illustration of the many benefits of synergy and
technological cooperation that give the company’s three auto-
motive divisions and their brands their new depth. At the
company’s Berlin research facility, Stefan Bussmann describes
a new computer software, a so-called “agent system” that iden-
tifies and networks autonomous, automated components
within a production or supply chain. This permits each agent
to adapt to changes it detects in the system around it, and co-
ordinate its response with the other agents. This system will
introduce a quantum shift in manufacturing efficiency and
flexibility by increasing throughput by at least 10%, making it
possible to respond more flexibly to market changes. Down
the corridor, Volker May of the Knowledge-Based Engineering
unit, explains to lay visitors a diagnostic system that originated
in DaimlerChrysler Aerospace’s space shuttle program and is
now finding its way into passenger cars. While May’s presenta-
tion is a thing of beauty to the industrial engineer, it is bewil-
deringly technical to his visitors. Not that it matters. May’s au-
dience has understood much more than he could possibly
convey in words – about that place in the mind where science
and the heart meet in a passion for the cutting edge, engineer-
ing excellence and common business sense.
But it is Hans-Joachim Schöpf, chief engineer of the Merce-
des-Benz and smart division, who offers the most acute
summation of the relationship between technology, inno-
vation and, ultimately, performance. “We must meet custom-
er expectations, then go beyond them. At the same time, we
must be asking how we can distinguish ourselves through
innovation, and create a unique selling proposition, but still
have people say, ‘This is real value for money.’ Quality, cost
and innovation at the right time are all critical, but at the
heart is pace-making innovation. After all, we have a 6-8
year life cycle in the automotive industry, while in the
electronics industry it’s only 12 months. The question we
have to address is how we adapt to higher rates of change
in associated industries.”
The key, says Schöpf, is process leadership, creating a
workplace that encourages a rapid exchange of ideas and
information among designers and engineers, combined with a
high degree of digital product development, and placing work-
shops in the heart of the developmental “marketplace”.
For Schöpf, the qualities he finds most admirable in his
Auburn Hills colleagues are their flexibility – “they are very
nimble in process” – their unfailing concern about containing
costs; and their insight into the business development process.